afterimage
by FreezeDryedGorgeous
Summary: You meet him in a church. He has black eyes and thin fingers that scribble over the pages with a leaky pen. He is crossing out lines in The Holy Bible and rewriting them in his own hand. His penmanship is not very good. (l/light, creepy fic for halloween!)


**notes: **hello! this is halloween fic, in a vague way, although mostly it's just minimally creepy and overwhelmingly incoherent. i had an idea, i tried to write it (with oct 31st as the deadline for finishing) and it didn't turn out half as well as i wanted it to, but alas. at least it's on time! thanks to my tumblr buds for encouraging me and inspiring me to get this done.

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**afterimage**

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You meet him in a church. He has black eyes and thin fingers that scribble over the pages with a leaky pen. He is crossing out lines in The Holy Bible and rewriting them in his own hand. His penmanship is not very good.

"The translation is wrong," he says before you even ask - if you were going to ask, rather than just wait there soundlessly behind him. You'd wonder how he'd known you were there, except you don't wonder things like that anymore. "I'm fixing it," he continues, after several moments of silence in which you suppose you're meant to say something, but don't.

If he's trying to prompt you into a discussion about the damage of sacred property, he's not succeeding.

You sit down beside him at the pew, body folding smaller as you huddle in on yourself, the way you do these days. "Do I know you?" you ask him, watching his wispy, bendable wrist.

He stops writing. "I don't see why you wouldn't."

You don't know what that means, but then you think phrases like that don't really mean anything at all. He looks up, large eyes blinking at you with sharp interest, as if he expects something. You're sure you're not providing it. There is something about him that is familiar, the black and the white and the jagged edges, smooth but dirty, and smelling mechanical and soapy and asleep. He is perhaps something you waded through a long, long time ago - maybe as a child - like poison oak, or a river up to your knees, but it's all vague now.

_Nostalgia_, that's it. That's the word you're looking for.

"I'm Light," you say, holding out your hand, the way you've been holding out your hand for a while now. It feels like you've been introducing yourself for years with no in-between.

He tilts his head at you. Nostalgic. "I'm sorry, I just assume that everyone around here knows me. I'm the greatest detective, you see." He takes your hand. His palm is cold. "My name is L."

"It's nice to meet you," you say, even though it's not. You have to keep up appearances, even now.

He lets go of your hand and goes back to his book. You could stand up, leave the church, go somewhere else. You don't.

* * *

You and L like to visit the park together, because even though nothing's in bloom right now, there's a still, silent beauty that jags through the branches, brittle in its intensity. You think you should be able to feel more here, but it's like touching something through gauze and the sensations are vague and indistinct.

"Like your ears are filled with cotton," L says, nodding, after you explain it to him. Or you try to. You're not as good at things as you used to be, but he nods like he understands, feathery black hair dripping in his eyes. "This happens, sometimes. There are records. Books I can lend you."

You can't remember the last time you read a book.

You say, "I can't remember the last time I read a book."

Someone told you that you were brilliant once, but you don't remember who or how, or where that person had gone. Unrelated, but wafting around in your head regardless, is an image of the dogwood tree in your childhood friend's front yard, and standing on the porch, nervous about ringing the bell but more afraid of admitting it to your father, who's standing behind you, urging you forward. You hadn't wanted to go over in the first place. You don't even like your friend.

Sometime later, after you and L have left the park, you remember that your father was the one who told you that you were brilliant - or at least, he was the first one.

Sometime after that, you remember that your father is dead.

* * *

You sit for a long time, as if having woken up abruptly from a nap, except you hadn't been a sleep. You don't really sleep, anymore.

You track L down and tell him about this sequence of events and he laughs in his joyless way and nods, as if he knows it all, and had known it before you did - from the pinprick image of your father's eyes closing and the spit on your mouth as you'd tried to yell him awake, to the dizzy feeling in your head when the memory had hit you. You don't know how you could have possibly forgotten, but everything that isn't recent feels so far-removed.

"I didn't really like your father," L tells you, at one of your usual scheduled dinners, where you both eat nothing and he talks a lot more than you, even though something in you insists it should be the other way around. "Well, no, I did, but more out of a sense of propriety than anything else. And I don't usually have a sense of propriety, so the fact that he instilled one in me makes him a rather more remarkable man than not." L clears his throat, claw-like fingers wrapping into a fist to muffle it. "That sounds more complimentary than it is. Remarkability isn't so grand as it sounds, it simply means worthy of comment."

You know what it means, but you don't tell him that. You want to defend your father, but you can't remember what you particularly thought of him.

Soichiro Yagami, you think, and then just _Yagami_. Of course, of course, how could you have forgotten? Everyone just calls you Light now.

You say it old loud, blending the word with the air with an exuberance that's probably strange of you to attach to your own name. _"Yagami."_

L's eyes snap to yours and he looks shocked and then angry and then his facial muscles flex in ways you didn't know they could, and if he had eyebrows, you're sure they'd be inching drastically upwards. He smiles and it is strange. He is usually boisterous - in an uneven sort of way that doesn't fit his figure, like a stray cat doing sideshow acts - but he doesn't often smile, and when he does it is a mockery of the sunless paths down that you tread on early mornings. But he smiles now.

"Lawliet," he says in reply, and you don't know what the word means, but he is so thrilled that it doesn't really matter. You are happy. You had almost forgotten your own name, but you remember now.

And names, as you know, are important.

* * *

_The human whose name is written in this note shall die._

All the books say that, but you want to read something else, so L takes you to the library.

"There's quite a selection, really," he says, slumping down a long aisle that disappears into the dim a few yards off, long fingers skimming the shelves, stirring up dust. You feel like you should be sneezing, or having some kind of bodily reaction to the age and disuse of the place, but you aren't.

You don't do things like that anymore.

The two of you find a quiet corner to settle in, and a stack of history and language texts to share between you, and spend the day flitting between the shelves like studious ghosts.

* * *

It's in the late dim of some night or another that his body finally ends up on yours, pressing you into the wooden bench of the pew, tugging at your bones and spreading across your skin, flickering fingers and hot hot hotter than anything in this chilly place. This is a taboo, this is a _sin_ and not just because of the church.

It's empty. It's always empty.

You are not empty.

His skin is rough and he laughs against your temple and it's like melding with a god, like digging your claws into a monster. You choke and you yell with a velocity that you have lacked for a long time now - years, maybe, or perhaps only in the moments since you've met him. But then he feels like a constant, as if you'd never existed without knowing him or knowing of him.

He is light and shadow, he is turbulence, and you are dying as he fucks you. It feels like necrophilia. You don't think you've breathed air in a year.

He comes and you come and it's all wrong - so so wrong - but then it's alright again. You lean your head on his skin and it's alright again. He is feathered and tapering and deadly. His skin cools rapidly against yours. You miss the days, if there were days, when you could see him without the haze of worlds clogging up the space between you.

You frown, sitting up. "Have we done this before?" you ask, more earnest than you typically like to be.

He smiles keenly at you and rolls over.

* * *

She's new, but she's not unfamiliar.

You're in the park with L when you see her. You point and your finger wavers and you forget all about decorum. "I know her from somewhere," you say, eyes wide and if you had one, your heart would be pounding right about now.

"Yes, you do," L says, after a long time of not saying anything. She is golden and swaying and he watches her intently, as if searching for something. You want to ask what it is, what he knows and how he knows it, but things come back to you in stripes and you are afraid.

There's a whole history behind you, you're sure, but you've put it in a box somewhere and there it waits. L's got a key to the box or else he's just got a key to you, or maybe -

There's golden glitter and there's the late night whir or human mechanics and sugar smudged on your cheek and you're thinking, _I am the luckiest boy in the world_, at the same time as you're thinking, _I don't want to do this I don't want to do this I don't want to_ -

And then L sinks into you, except he's in a different body - smaller, leaner, fleshier and breathing and full of spark and bitter amusement and pulsing breaths. You are playing a game, you are throwing a gambit, and he is playing with you.

You are 18 years old. He is older. Misa Amane is somewhere in-between. She moves in her gleaming shades across the park and you don't watch, you can't look at her, you _can't look_.

After a few staggering moments, you turn to L and say, "We were human once, weren't we?"

* * *

You meet him at a commencement ceremony, the first time.

The second time, you meet him in a church, hunkered down and bending his long, white, monstrous body into curling shapes. His claws trace the pages. The Shinigami Realm is new to you at that point, but it feels like the only place you've ever been.

The landscape is vast and deserted but you make a park-trail through the ruins for your midday walks, and calculate daylight by when the sun is least blotted out. The human world spins in tiny pictograms at the edges of yours, but you never look too closely at it. You never feel any need.

L rattles things off about _trauma_ and _hysteria induced amnesia_ and you nod like you care and watch his bones cycle in on themselves and fuck him like dynamite. He speaks to you like you're old friends and you don't object because it feels right, like he came here with you, from wherever you'd come.

But that's not right is it? You met him at a commencement ceremony. You said goodbye on a linoleum floor. His body had been warm, and then it had been cold. Your body had lasted longer.

Now you both have different bodies, different lives, different existences. Ryuk laughs his way past you like an old friend, every so often, but you don't speak to him. It takes you a long time to remember why.

It takes you a long time to remember anything, and L never clues you in. From the moment you arrived in this world, in your new-made vessel with your slate clean mind, he'd only scribbled with his jagged hands and followed your lead.

You ask him, but he never answers. At least, not until -

"I killed you, didn't I?"

It's after you've talked to Misa. You've talked to Ryuk and the King and everyone who will associate with you - which is scant number, as the recently human are relative social pariahs - and you have pieced together a vague picture of your life on earth. Kira, the supernatural killer.

_The human who's name is written in this note shall die._

"I wrote your name, didn't I?" You stare at him and he stares at the barren landscape, library books clutched under his long arm, oily darkness ringing his eyes.

"Yes, a bit," he says, at length. "It took me years to remember that, originally. You've advanced quite a bit faster. But then, I didn't have anyone to help." His smile is familiar, and you see it on his human face as you remember it, spiraling under your mind's eye, strange and exaggerated, like a child's drawing.

He looks different now. Uglier, in some ways, but morbidly appealing in others. And your face can't be much better, although there are no mirrors in the Shinigami realm with which to check. You can see your great bronze claws, though, and the fire that licks at your fingertips, and they are certainly less finely kept than your human hands.

You killed him and now you are here. You killed him and he died in your arms and you hated him as a profession. You like him now. He takes you on walks in the park. He brings you books. He laughs at all the things you can't remember and holds your disfigured hand in his.

He fucks you, even though there are written rules that say not to.

"Do you resent me for it?" you ask, when he doesn't elaborate on his feelings.

His mouth is made of bone and gristle now, and it crinkles as the edge tilts up. You can see that expression twisting his human flesh, too. "I don't see why I wouldn't," he says.

Then he slips his arm through yours and the two of you, with wretched contentedness, float your way through the brambling dark of the world that you now belong to.

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**end.**

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**end notes:** sooooooo. the whole idea that i had was "let's write a fic where L and light are shinigami but the reader doesn't know that until near the end." obviously, it's debatable on whether i succeeded in making it non-obvious, but it was something i wanted to try. i've been going on lately about how there's not enough fic/discussion of the mystical elements of death note so (in addition to beginning to write it into my wip) i decided to try my hand at some.

thank you for reading!


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